After the announcement that a stage production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play set two decades after the final Harry Potter book, cast Hermione Grainger with a Black actress. some circles of fandom have spoken up about the casting in unflattering ways.

J.K. Rowling has no problem with this casting — and views it as fitting within the canon she created. So why is there such pushback against this casting? The idea of default whiteness. I (Keidra) had something to say about this on Twitter earlier in the day:

This whole Hermione thing is not at all about “protecting canon” but about protecting the idea of default whiteness in fiction/media.

Fictional Characters The idea of default whiteness is based around the concept that a character is presumed white unless specifically and explicitly described as not white. One of the big pushbacks in this Hermione debate is J.K. Rowling’s tweet below:

One of the arguments that I (Keidra) have gotten since posting my own tweet on the subject is that Rowling was being disingenuous in her statement because she never specifically described Hermione as non-white in the book and a white girl (Emma Watson) was cast for the movie.

What these critics fail to acknowledge is that many readers do not make the assumption that a character not explicitly described as white is white, hence my point. Hermione, based on the above description, could easily be cast as a black woman without betraying canon, not to mention nothing about Hermione being a person of color would take away from or contradict for her established backstory.

And this is the problem with presumed default whiteness in fiction and mass media, because this viewpoint makes it impossible to view a non-white person in a role even when the racial background of the character has NOTHING to do with the role. Harry Potter exists in not only a fictional, but a magical universe and yet so-called canon sticklers attempted to make up reasons for why Hermione as a black person was “unrealistic.”

J.K. Rowling didn’t retcon the Hermione character as black, she simply stated that canonically she didn’t have to be white. And that alone was enough to infuriate some fans. The concept of a character being interpreted as non-white in one retelling of a story is the equivalent of the entire canon of a story being betrayed.

Rue in the Hunger Games film

Referencing another fictional universe in The Hunger Games, Rue, a character who was specifically and explicitly described as black in the books was defaulted to white by some readers. Some movie viewers were dismayed at the casting of a black girl in the films, going so far as to say that her death in the film was less emotional because they had not imagined her as black when they read the book.

This, my friends, is default whiteness in a nutshell. In the past couple of years in fandom circles ,we’ve seen a very vocal push against this kind of thinking, but it’s been hard to fight. It’s actually easier to push for “diversity” than it is to push against the concept of default whiteness, the idea that stories are by default centered around white characters because they are perceived as “universal stories.” This, in short, is the reason why the conversation of representation in mass media always hits a wall. If the concept of non-white people in fictional, magical worlds can’t be accepted as realistic, there is more than a perception issue at play, there is a fundamental block in the way that people see (or refuse to see) how race plays out in mass media storytelling.

Historical characters

One of the largest arguments raised for default whiteness, specifically the casting of white (or white seeming) actors is that this casting is historically accurate. But it isn’t really accurate in any sense of the word, otherwise white actors of any background wouldn’t be seemingly randomly cast as both evil oppressors and victims in any European World War II story. Cast a Jewish person of color? To play a Jewish person, perhaps even their ancestor? That can’t occur because it would be historically inaccurate.

But there have always been people of color in places that default whiteness says are impossible (and sometimes will level down to improbable). The recent movie, Belle, about a Black woman in Great Britain who was the grand-niece of Lord Mansfield (who started Great Britain down the road to abolition) was based on a true story.

Just because the stories that are mostly told are based on default whiteness, doesn’t mean they are the only stories to be told.

Two of the most important European writers that serve as representatives of culture from those countries are of African-descent; their stories demonstrate how default whiteness is wrong.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian writer who is considered the founder of modern Russian literature. Oh, and he was of African descent. But if there would be someone who would be cast to play a historical Russian poet, the default will be to cast a white actor every time. Even though there is historical proof that perhaps … casting Jesse Williams would also make sense.

Alexandre Dumas

And for an example that is more likely to be familiar to American audiences — what about The Three Musketeers and its ilk? There wouldn’t be any Black people in the historically accurate story of it’s writing, would there? But there would! Alexandre Dumas was a French writer of historical novels, including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Man in the Iron Mask. And Black. So how about casting him outside of the bounds of default whiteness.

Final Note: We Haven’t Gotten As Far As We Thought

Some day a movie will be made about the extraordinary story of the Renaissance man, Alexandre Lippmann, who was a French artist and fencer, winning metals at three different Olympics. Maybe by that point, default whiteness won’t be a factor in casting him, considering he was both Jewish and a descendant of Alexander Dumas. But it is much more likely that to be historically accurate, he will not be cast with anyone with similar heritage, but instead with someone who fulfills a spot that is less problematic for white audiences.

And casting for roles hasn’t moved that far from the days where white actors had all the roles — white, Black, Asian, Native peoples, etc. As long as the role was “noble” and there would be some romance, only white people were allowed to be cast. We only need to look at the true story of Anna Mae Wong, a Chinese-American actor, who was not allowed to play the main character in The Good Earth, a Chinese farmer, because she wasn’t white. Or Pearlie, the movie with the tagline “The love story of a girl who passed for white!” where a white actress plays the role of a light-skinned Black woman.

If you are a white reader, you may think — “well, that happened a long time ago.” So I will remind you that Star Trek, a series beloved to geeks and nerds, had the first interracial kiss on television. And it was censored by Southern stations. And even to have the kiss — it needed to be coerced by alien forces — neither Kirk or Uhura were allowed to choose to kiss.

Not as much has changed with default whiteness in media as many would like to assume. And that is why we will continue to write posts like this!

This is an excerpt from our essay published in The Good Life in Asia’s Digital 21st Century, an essay collection published by the Digital Asia Hub. The entire essay collection is available here, and is Creative Commons licensed. Please cite the published version — and list Keidra as the first author, which will be corrected in the second edition of the collection.

YouTube’s first music awards surprised many mainstream music fans in 2013, when the Korean pop (“K-pop”) group Girls’ Generation beat out many U.S. pop music stars for Video of the Year (Yang, 2013). In 2015, the fans of K-pop group T-ara won Billboard’s Fan Army Face-Off, beating out the fans of well-established Western artists like One Direction and Beyoncé (“Fan Army,” 2015). The matchup against One Direction led to the globally trending hashtag on Twitter, #WeLove1DandKpop (“Fan Army,” 2015). While some U.S. critics and Western music fans may see these events as flukes, there is a complex history at play here. This years-long history involves the interaction of mobilized fans, the use of worldwide accessible platforms and social media, and global copyright law, upending the assumed social order of online fan communities.

Media scholar Henry Jenkins (2006) has described “convergence culture” as both a bottom-up and top-down process by which media consumers negotiate their right to participate and interact with new media tools, even while media owners negotiate with creating new revenue opportunities and normalizing consumer behaviors (Jenkins, 2006, p. 243). K-Pop fan community activity is an example of this, serving as both a cultural practice and a global market catalyst.

Specific online platforms help to facilitate this fandom activity. For example, conversations on YouTube are fan-driven and lack the gate-keeping and hierarchy of more traditional outlets. This freedom to discover, communicate, and respond makes YouTube an ideal forum for niche fan communities to connect and mobilize. Observe a YouTube comment thread for any K-Pop group, and you’ll likely see a global community of fans stumping for their beloved group in a variety of award categories. This happens with other fan communities, certainly, but because so much of this global fan conversation occurs on YouTube, it follows that mobilizing fans would be easier for K-pop fans in this space. YouTube picked up on this interaction early, launching an official, dedicated K-Pop channel in 2011 (Sang-Hun & Russell, 2012).

This short essay will explore how the South Korean music industry has responded formally and informally to online fan activity, and how a light copyright touch led to the worldwide success of K-pop. We will also explore how online activity disputes regarding K-pop have been almost entirely outside of a legal context – unlike the fans (or listeners) versus labels (or artists) debate that is the continued focus of U.S. music industry.

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It’s TLF’s eighth birthday. Big achievements unlocked! It’s hard to believe that we have been running this for eight years — and we are so glad that our readership continues to be strong. Until now, this has been a labor of love — meaning that we have done all of the work and paid for everything ourselves. We are committed to engaging with pop culture and technology in new and interesting ways that remain critical and fun.

Our biggest news items for the coming year are related. We’ve received a grant to support our push to expand the voices writing critical and accessible articles and essays about popular culture, fan studies, and online culture. And to help us, we now have a fiscal sponsor: San Francisco-based Independent Arts and Media.

And that has led to our next piece of big news — the TLF seminar series starting in January 2016! We look forward to sharing these new longform pieces that pay. We want to be part of the movement in digital media to prioritize paying people for the work that they do and to retain rights to their work — and this is a small step in that direction. We would love to expand further with additional grants, so that we can fund more great writing and media.

How can you support TLF, if you are one of our readers? We do have a Patreon, but what you can do for us mostly is to share our writing and talk about it with others. Help us make TLF a source for critical writing that isn’t found elsewhere.

How can you support TLF, if you are at another publication? We are interested in republishing our content elsewhere to get more readers, so email us about cross-posting or republishing.

How can you support TLF, if you have funds — or know of a funding body that would give us a grant?Email us!

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Come check out TLF Editors Kristin Bezio and Keidra Chaney at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Milwaukee on November 15th on the panel: “Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Damsels: The Precarity of Feminism in Digital Spaces” Come chat with us, ask us about the 2016 Seminar Series or invite us to karaoke.